Performance evaluation of sheepdog distributed storage system

Distributed storage systems (DSS) are becoming even more important and complex due to the emergence of paradigms such as cloud computing, and the challenges for dealing with big data. DSS provide a set of services such as publishing, file sharing and high performance utility storage. In addition, there is a growing demand to support these services with high scalability, availability and low cost. Sheepdog is a distributed storage system which aims at providing storage volumes with high availability, using clusters of common machines. This type of storage system may prove useful in the VMS (Video Monitoring Service) market and as remote storage for cloud-based applications. This paper analyzes the scalability of Sheepdog clusters, by measuring the performance with different number of nodes and different replication degrees. The system analyzed here showed better performance for read operations in small cluster sizes than in larger ones. On the other hand, proper scalability was found for the write throughput, since no significant performance degradation was noticed when the number of cluster nodes increased.